May 30, 2026 at 1:40 pm Updated May 30, 2026 at 3:44 pm Reports of an explosion from people across New England on Saturday afternoon sent police agencies and others scrambling to understand what caused a double boom that shook buildings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The American Meteor Society said that the booms people heard were actually caused by a meteor about 3 feet (nearly 1 meter) wide entering the atmosphere around the New Hampshire border with Massachusetts, north of Boston. NASA officials confirmed that the meteor was natural material, not a satellite or space debris, and that it entered the atmosphere at 2:06 p.m. American Meteor Society program monitor Robert Lunsford said the group received dozens of reports from Delaware to Montreal with people either hearing the double boom, feeling the ground shake or seeing the fireball — which he said looked like a shooting star in the daytime sky. “It was definitely bigger than a normal fireball, about a yard wide,” he said.…